Printing Options

PowerPoint gives you a variety of ways to print out your presentations.

Slides—Use this printing option when you want one slide per page. This is useful when you’re giving your presentation to someone else and you want them to see all the details of the presentation.

Handouts—This option lets you print multiple slides (you pick how many) on each sheet. Use this for an overview of your presentation. This view is also useful for the presenter: you can use this to make notes to yourself with each slide.

Handout, three slides per page—Oddly, when you select this option, PowerPoint lets you print 3 slides along with a series of blank lines to the right of each slide—perfect for writing notes to yourself. This option also is good if you want members of the audience to take notes while watching your presentation.

Notes page—In this option, PowerPoint prints each slide on a separate sheet but also puts the notes (which you’ve added when you created the slides) in the bottom half of each page—very convenient for creating a script to read (or guide you) for your presentation.

Outline—Lets you print only the text of your presentation (that is, the text that appears on the slides) in the form of an outline.

Headers and footers—Want to add the date or your name (or something else) to the top or bottom of each page you print out? When you select Notes or Handouts print options, you can also use the “options” menu to get to the Headers and Footers menu, where you can make these designations.

More printing options:

If these printing options are not enough, you can print PowerPoint presentations via Microsoft Word. Printing in this way allows you to print more (or fewer) than three slides with notes per page, to change the print margins, and to access a number of formatting options available in Word. To access these options, select File à Send to à Microsoft Office Word. Printing large PP files in this way can cause difficulties however.

For more information and a tutorial for printing PowerPoint presentations, visit: http://office.microsoft.com/training/Training.aspx?AssetID=RC012252301033&CTT=6&Origin=RC012252301033